How's This for Some Extra Hard Drive Storage?

So you think your 500 gigabyte hard drive is pretty cool? Thinking about upgrading to a terabyte? Well, if you think that these storage solutions are pretty high up on the information storage food chain, think again. One byte consists of 8 bits of information. For example, Final Cut Pro (on normal settings) renders 8 bits (or one byte) of information at a time. The old Sega Genesis could process 16 bits (2 bytes) of graphic info. at a time. Most computers these days are using either 32 or if you're really on top of it - 64 bit processors. And as far as storage - well - we all know those media files are large - often hundreds of megabytes or even a few gigabytes large - so we have our external hard drives that eventually fill up. Now just try to comprehend the following. Be sure to click on the title of this blog when you're through reading this to see where your hard drive falls in on the charts of available defined storage space for information. The yobibyte is the largest one on the list. I don't know who is using a capacity this immense but I would love to find out. Perhaps in 40 years, everyone will be walking around with 500 yobibyte mph - hologram players...or perhaps, it is simply some unattainable single figure that could only apply to collective data. Either way, gigabyte or yobibyte, I just want to know - does Yoda bite?

From Wikipedia:

A yobibyte (a contraction of yotta binary byte) is a unit of information or computer storage, commonly abbreviated YiB.

1 yobibyte = 280 bytes = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes = 1,024 zebibytes

The yobibyte is closely related to the yottabyte, which can either be a synonym for yobibyte, or refer to 1024 bytes = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, depending on context (see binary prefix).

The zebi and yobi prefixes were originally not part of the system of binary prefixes, but were added by the International Electrotechnical Commission in August 2005.

You can click the title of this blog to find out more about the levels of information storage.